“Hold your camera high and click / Exercise your right to picture this,” Sarah Bonito gleefully sings on the chorus of “Picture This.” “But don’t forget to show everybody you’ve ever known.”
Even before I first listened to “Picture This,” I’ve maintained this exact sentiment in nearly every aspect of my life.
If you’ve spent almost any time around me, you’d be familiar with my non-official slogan, “Wait, y’all, hold still,” accompanied by a photographic lens shoved in your face.
Being a journalist doesn’t help, but I unconsciously take multiple pictures a day, whether it’s on my phone, my pocket-sized digital camera or my amateur Canon DSLR — and if I’m feeling bougie, I use my Polaroid camera.
My Instagram spam account, where I’ve been posting daily since the summer of 2023, has just about 1,200 posts — many of them containing more than one photo from the day. I use the account more as an archive than a way to document my life, following one simple rule: never delete anything.
Consequently, there are numerous appearances of people who aren’t in my life anymore.
However, for some reason or another — at some point in my life — they were important enough to be featured, for me to want to remember them through my eyes.
Even though this might make me a photographic hoarder, I can’t help but scroll through my account, letting a rush of memories flood my psyche. From friends’ birthday parties past to meeting my roommate for the first time and even my high school prom, these snapshots in time unravel, providing a vivid retelling of my happiest moments my mind sometimes tends to forget.
On Feb. 11 — probably after fumbling with my iPhone to take a photo of some birds — I picked up a copy of The Phoenix, landing on an opinion piece by writer Sadie Harlan, proposing taking fewer photos to live more presently in the moment. In a “That’s So Raven”-esque flashback sequence, my entire credo of life seemed to come crashing down, time slowing like watching your nearly-full-$7-latte explode on the pavement.
After the whiplash, I started reflecting.
I find the most beautiful memories inside the most mundane photos. An awkward selfie in the bathroom of an airplane (shortly after taking the photo, I found out I won an Illinois College Press Association award, my first award as a journalist), a pic of one of my best friends eating a burger (the night after graduation) or a poorly composed shot of the de Nobili terrace (the day I met my boyfriend).
Because of moments like this, I’m a huge proponent of “the candid.” The photographer doesn´t stop to set up a shot or to make sure the lighting is just right — they quite literally “point and shoot.”
Consequently, the majority of my camera roll is out of focus, random pics of my friends at the most inconsequential of times, but those are the photos I want to cherish — the everyday, not just the special moments.
I’d much rather have a crooked photo with squinting eyes than a photo at The Pink Wall. The world is full of spontaneity, not photo ops.
Unfortunately, my mantra of photographing everything has led to a Google account maxed out on storage, a dorm room wall covered in polaroids and heaps of SD cards overflowing out of my junk drawer.
I guess. In other words, I have a problem dwelling on the past.
I remember a time my voice cracked in my middle school’s production of “The Wiz.” Boohoo!
I still reference the bratty, Plastic-esque ruling class of my high school. Who cares?
Hell, I regularly bring up the time I swear my dad tried to abandon me in an indoor playground when I was five years old — he was in the bathroom.
While most wouldn’t think twice about these — admittedly forgettable — snapshots, I yearn to hold on to them. Oh, how I wish I could sharpen the fuzzy mental souvenirs. As backwards as it sounds, I would give anything to have at least one photograph of these histories, one 4X6 to hold in my hands and meticulously analyze.
My seemingly endless catalogue of photos doesn’t stem from a love of my past, but from a fear of forgetting.
I don’t want to forget how my on-stage flub helped me persevere past even the most embarrassing of situations. Beating the dead horses of those who peaked in high school reminds me to stay humble. And, my long-held grudge against my father serves as a testament my memory is — at times — fallible.
On Mother’s Day 2025, my grandmother Anna Maria Kurcz Stovich — exactly one week after her 104th birthday — passed away. For about the last 20 years of her life, she’d been dealing with Alzheimer’s disease — the most common form of dementia — which greatly worsened in the last decade of her life.
As the years went by, I became more and more unknown to her, until one day, she forgot who I was entirely. Her eyes, once filled with a lively twinkle, dimmed with each passing visit.
But when my family and I would bring old photos — even if just for a split second — the spark in her eyes would return, the corners of her mouth slightly lifting into a smile. Though initially disheartened when she could identify me as a baby but not an adult, my sadness washed away when I could see her reliving the photos in her mind.
Photographs weren’t just a reminder of her past; they were her past.
When I look back at the 19,000 items in my camera roll, I see my personal history. I see the moments I think about daily and those that’ve become buried deep in the recesses of my mind.
While I can’t control the inevitable degradation of my memory, armed with my arsenal of photographs, I can choose which memories to surround myself with.
